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8//02/2013 - 12/02/2013
Friday
Our time in Shanghai began with the seven of us tramping around in the icy early morning, following the directions of anyone and everyone as we searched for our hostel, before retreating to our respective rooms and napping for several hours. When we finally woke up, it was to head straight to the gigantic 5-story Forever 21 just down the road to buy going-out clothes for the rest of the week. All things considered, I think we were quite restrained. The afternoon was, for me and the other Jiangxi girls, spent panicking about how we'd get home from Ha'erbin after the holiday. Travel during Spring Festival is ridiculous because the whole country's on the move, visiting family, and nobody had bothered to tell us that the booking period had been extended from 10 to 21 days, so finding tickets was a real struggle - not helped by the moodiest, most unhelpful ticket officer you could imagine. Anyway, we finally managed to get it sorted (no thanks to Jony and Jono, who sat laughing at our panic throughout the whole process) and then it was time, for some of us, for the first night out of the week. Initially, we set off for a bar near the hostel we'd passed earlier, but the overenthusiastic manager trying to coax us inside and one glance through the windows convinced us this was not the best option and instead we flagged down two taxis. Not knowing the names or addresses of any club, we just mimed drinking and dancing and shouted for the French concession, where we'd heard there were clubs. Miraculously, we all ended up on the same street, and found both each other and a club with an offer on unlimited drinks within minutes. I'd like to say this is where we spent the rest of the night, but the truth is that some of us may have been a little too enthusiastic with the unlimited drinks offer and we actually ended up stumbling/carrying each other out of taxis and back to the hostel only about two hours after we'd left. A proud night for us all!
Saturday
The next day began with a group outing to the Bund, which was only five minutes walk from our hostel. We strolled along in the sun, taking dozens of photos, and appreciating the skyline until we actually got a bit bored of it. Turns out the Bund just keeps going and going and all the photos actually look pretty similar, so after about forty minutes of this we plunged off in search of the Temple of the City Gods. The signs we were following led us through a series of bamboo gardens and out onto a packed market street overflowing with lanterns, posters and other decorations for the lunar new year. Following this street further, we found probably the best New Year decorations of our travels: lanterns swinging across the streets and enormous silk snakes and gods and flowers thrusting out of the walls of the tallest buildings. Beth spotted a little colourful alleyway leading away into one of these buildings, so we wandered down here and found ourselves in a catacomb of specialist souvenir and art shops. Silk-backed books, handmade silk slippers, animals woven from grass, portraits, painted landscapes, silk gowns, lots of porcelain... a lot of it was the standard tourist bait we've seen in most cities, but it was fun just exploring and browsing. At one point we stumbled into a courtyard composed mostly of decorative stone bridges weaving across a green pond full of Spring Festival decorations, all overlooked by what is apparently one of China's most famous teahouses. It was absolutely packed here; you actually had to queue just to walk in any direction, but we shuffled and barged and elbowed our way into the best photo-taking spots before shuffling, barging and elbowing our way back out again. We did eventually manage to find the Temple of the City Gods, but after all the other temples we've seen so far it was a little underwhelming: by far the smallest I've been to and too crowded to enjoy.
This was also February 9th, so the the eve of the Lunar New Year and we all had big plans to watch "the world's greatest firework display" on the Bund and then go clubbing together. We girls were taking full advantage of the opportunity to get dressed up, and were still crowded around the bathroom mirrors getting ready when we were told that the fireworks were starting an hour earlier than we'd thought, at 9pm, and that we had to go, NOW! We left the hostel at a sprint, slowing only to watch the boys set off firecrackers in the street. Several of the girls popped into a corner shop to stock up on drinks, where we had a quick dance with the world's cutest shopkeepers, and then we were on the Bund with hundreds of other people, slowly realising that the fireworks weren't starting at 9pm after all. At first we didn't mind waiting for the fireworks: we made a spectacle of ourselves by singing a Chinese New Year song very loudly for everyone else on the Bund, took lots of photos with our new fans, ran about making friends with other tourists, bumped into the group of other PT China volunteers and caught up, overused our phrase of the night, "hashtag, on the Bund!"... but it was cold, and we were all dressed for partying rather than resisting the elements so after the first hour or so some people started to struggle. Several people returned to the hostel to change into warmer shoes and pick up more drinks, Cat and I went running off looking for corner shops and ended up buying several Chinese lanterns and there were brief excursions to warm our feet under the handdryers in the public toilets, but we all managed to survive the three-hour wait until midnight, when the fireworks were due. In the last half hour or so, the whole promenade filled with thousands of people all waiting for the fireworks, so when the time came we were all packed together excitedly... for what turned out to be the biggest disappointment of the entire holiday. "World's greatest firework display"?! It lasted about three minutes and could have been surpassed by anyone's back-garden Bonfire Night celebrations. Very, very underwhelming. A lot of the group decided to give the night up as lost after this and went back to bed, leaving only nine of us remaining to search for a club. This was another hour waiting in the cold, waiting for taxis and somehow splitting into two groups, before the five of us remaining (me, Cat, Henry, Nold and Pete) managed to find a club within walking distance, which is where we stayed until the club started to empty at 5am. Highlights included finding a man who looked exactly like Pitbull, Beth, Dan, Hannah and Rob arriving, dancing on stage together until it was only us and a random, bald man left and, of course, the First Coming of Party Jesus.
Sunday
The next day we were up bright and early and... in time for lunch. Again, there were so many of us that we quickly, if accidentally, split off into lots of smaller groups. Beth, Cat and I retraced our path from the day before in search of a subway station but it was packed beyond belief. The big main streets were crammed with people shuffling along in one giant pack; the same journey took maybe twice the time it had before because we physcially didn't have the space to walk at a normal pace. The subway station, when we finally found it, was even worse - just a seething mass of people struggling into thirty different queues, so full that you could barely see any of the floor. We took one look and pushed our way straight back up the stairs, deciding that our budget would stretch to a taxi after all. We then went to see the French Concession, which turned out not to be that far. When I say the French concession was all grey brick buildings, it sounds like the worst place ever, but it was actually quite pretty - lots of fairy lights and little outdoors cafes and things like that. We wandered about practicing our posh gap-yah accents, got very excited about the availability of Doritos in a fancy international supermarket we found and then stumbled across a New Year's dragon dance. I don't know the proper name for this, but it's when a group of people maneuver a big dragon puppet: they each have a stick attached to part of the dragon, and they run about to make the dragon puppet dance and twine about. I've seen these 'dances' practiced a lot in the square in Jiujiang, but this one was much more professional: all of the dancers had smart silk outfits, there were more complicated moves (a syncronised roll across the floor at one point!) and they had actual drummers rather than a dodgy stereo. After the dance ended, we even managed to run in for photos with the dragon before the rest of the spectators caught on and it was completely hidden by the crush of people.
This was the same afternoon that Tessa returned from England, so naturally we had to go out again to celebrate. This time we went to a club in the French concession that Beth, Cat and I had spotted earlier. I went earlier with Alice, Mary, Naomi, Tessa and Jony whilst the others searched for a pub to watch the rugby, and we'd been there barely 10 minutes before Naomi had arranged a table for the six of us with a huge free bottle of Absolut vodka, jugs of orange juice and cola and cards to get us free drinks at the bar. We're not sure, but we think maybe being known for having lots of foreign patrons is good for business and that's why the promoters were so keen to throw hundreds of RMB of free alcohol our way. The rest of the group, plus two Dutch guys from our hostel, arrived a little later, and we established ourselves as the most enthusiastic dancers in the club (Chinese people in clubs seem to prefer sitting about on their phones and looking cool to actually dancing) for the rest of the night.
Monday
It was another slow start the next day, and then I spent the afternoon in search of/at the Shanghai fakes market. This took us hours to find, because we walked straight past it when we first got off the subway, took a few wrong turns and then followed the directions of maybe seven different passersby to circle back to where we'd started. I had lots of good intentions about buying gifts for people here, but I'd only brought so much money and it turned out I really needed some fake Uggs (for Ha'erbin) and really wanted a fake Mulberry bag so I'm afraid I didn't get anything for anyone else. Whoops. I was also a bad person, spending aaages in several shops where I looked at everything, asked lots of questions, quibbled about prices and then left without buying anything. Oh well! That night, our last night, we went back to the same club as the night before - at least, some of us did. Beth and I had invented our own drinking game, a Volunteer Bingo type game where every time another volunteer did something we'd bet they'd do (say a certain swear word/sing/shout a certain catch-phrase etc.), we had to take a shot. Unfortunately, Beth may have let slip some of the rules, some volunteers may have taken advantage, and we both ended up drinking more than we'd intended. When we arrived at the club, I helped Beth out of the taxi... and straight back into the next taxi that came by. I took her back to the hostel, put her to bed with a bottle of water and a bin she later fell asleep inside, and then went back to meet the others. Once again, we'd been given a table that was kept topped up with expensive whisky and vodka, although this time we were sharing it with several Irish guys we'd never met before. Dan mistakenly thought these were the guys that were paying for the drinks and so spent the whole night making sure he was super-friendly to them. This was also the night of the Second Coming of Party Jesus.
Tuesday
Tuesday morning began with a panic as neither Alice nor Hannah could find their passports. Alice was pretty sure that Jony, who'd already left, had taken hers by mistake, but Hannah had taken hers to the club the night before, so could've been anywhere. We searched the room and called the club before it turned out that Nold had it, having picked it up when it fell out of her bag. He also somehow had my phone, and had been in the process of claiming it as his own when someone pointed out is was mine. The Xinjiang volunteers left early, leaving most of us to check out, collect all of the things they'd left and collapse on the sofas downstairs to sleep some more. Not much happened on Tuesday - I went for a McDonald's and a quick trip to H&M, and that was literally it. Some volunteers had woken early to try visit the nearby Suzhou before our flight that evening, but it turned out that what they'd actually done was ride the subway, then the Maglev, backward and forward. Anyway, that was the end of our time in Shanghai. The ten of us remaining then headed to the airport to continue on to Qingdao.
Sorry these are taking me a while to get up!
- comments
Jim When do you get to stage the Third Coming of Jesus party:? Shanghai sounds fun, even if it was too crowded.